David Wahl on Creativity and Marketing

Video Game Dictionary – Half-Real

This dictionary of video game terms contains some common phrases, but it also has some new ideas for concepts unique to the video game world. His book is called Half-Real . I imagine that you can infer the rest of the book from this list of definitions.

Remember, fun is elusive and defining fun is by definition, not fun. Also, subversive play is an interesting concept. Video game characters rebelling against their creator and questioning their role in the seemingly unbendable rules of their world. Here are some examples:

Ant farming
“‘Ant-farming’ is when you design with a gods-eye view in mind – it’s when you throw around concepts which are ‘interesting’ or ‘provide fascinating social dynamics’ or ‘would really feel like a virtual world’ – but fail the basic ‘fun’ test. This is when the designers are designing a game that’s more fun to observe than to actually live in.” (Schubert 2004)

Subversive play
Subversive play is play against the intention or authority of the game design/game designer. (Flanagan 2005). The concept presupposes games that have a dominant authority that players can revolt against.

Fun
While fun is an elusive concept, the most popular school of thought claims that video game fun comes primarily from the enjoyment of problem solving.

Sid Meier claims that “A [good] game is a series of interesting choices” (Rollings & Morris 2000, p. 38).
Koster (2005) claims that fun arises from trying to understand the pattern of a game.
The idea of fun as a result of problem solving is also present in the concepts of interesting choices and aesthetic index.
A second school of thought describes video games as a combination of a number of different types of fun, where different games emphasize different types of fun.